CHAPTER V.
As we launched upon the days of Charles I., in our last talk, we had somewhat to say of the King’s advisers, lay and ecclesiastic; we came to quick sense of the war-clouds, fast gathering, through which Jeremy Taylor shot his flashes of pious eloquence; we heard a strain of Suckling’s verse, to which might have been added other, and may be better, from such Royalist singers as Carew or Lovelace;[69] but we cannot swoop all the birds into our net. We had glimpse of the crop-eared Prynne of the Histriomastix; and from Cowley, that sincere friend of both King and Queen in the days of their misfortunes, we plucked some “Poetical Blossoms;” also a charming “Rose,” from the orderly parterres of that great gardener, and pompous, time-serving man, Edmund Waller.
Then came Milton with the fairy melodies, always sweet, of “Comus”—the cantankerous pamphleteering—the soured home-life—the bloody thrusts at the image of the King, and the grander flight of his diviner music into the courts of Paradise.